Body Of Research: An Experiment In Hotwifing

by Arnica Butler

Jen, posing as “Jayla,” the youngish, bimbo profile from her Tinder account. Giggling, clubbing, fucking in a bathroom stall.

  Jen, as the demure and pretty Janice Hall of Once, slipping away to talk politics and have a bagel and a coffee with a man who drove a Lexus.

  Jenna, lover of horses, virginal and conservative, letting some creep take her panties off in the back of his car because she still lived with her parents.

  Jan, going to hotels and falling to her knees on the plush carpet with her mouth open to take some other man's cock inside...

  I wandered through Jen's strange apps aimlessly. Her prolific profiles, her real and non-real photos. Her likes and dislikes as alternate people, all the while imagining my wife as the women she had created, flirting, kissing, fucking the men she had attracted.

  There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to her path through the men of the city: jocks and college kids from apps the ilk of Tinder. Older men looking for true love (though notably, only as 'true' as a woman ten years younger could provide) on apps like TrueMatch.

  Black men, all black men, on an app called Mixd.

  My heart pounded out a special, wild rhythm for that one. I would go back to it, I vowed, as soon as I figured out what she was doing.

  And then, my heart beating, I found what I was looking for. What I had wanted to find, and not wanted to find, both with equal parts desperation and desire:

  A message.

  A response.

  In all of this frenzied, crazy, apparently promiscuous searching, my dear Jen had finally messaged someone.

  Or forgotten to delete it.

  I found it in the dating application labeled DeBauch, which took me a few beats to process as “debauchery.”

  “Stupid,” I muttered. I'm in marketing, and if there's one thing I can't stand it's a stupid brand name.

  I dug into the app.

  As I read the company slogan, my heart took another plunge to the floor.

  A dating application for married people.

  And it was then that I noticed that DB had numerous alerts along the top of her phone.

  I opened them, one by one, my horror mounting, my cock twitching in disbelieving arousal.

  I'm Matt. I saw your profile on DB You seem interesting. Want to meet up at Funky Stir?

  And:

  I'd never admit to a secret like that

  from some loser named Mike Trenton.

  I scanned the messages, some of them clearly a continuation of a longer conversation. I'm sorry I missed you; don't worry I have a second phone...

  A curtain of red fell over my eyes.

  My blood pressure was so high I felt I had maybe suffered a stroke.

  I kept swiping, almost robotically, my entire body numb with shock.

  And, well...

  Mildly aroused.

  A lot aroused.

  Alternating between “a lot aroused” and “curtain of rage.”

  Technically speaking, there was nothing specifically incriminating from Jen.

  In her messages on DB, she claimed to be using (but obviously was not) have a second phone. There was no indication that she had actually met up with anyone. No, “last night was amazing,” texts.

  But poring over the texts that were there, I realized that I was reading what I wanted to read into them. Finding any sliver of proof, any way to contort what I was seeing, into proof of a full-fledged affair (and by that, I mean sexual affair. Dirty, hole-gaping sexual affair).

  Jen was late again, which gave me plenty of time to look through her phone. Reading the same texts over and over. Fantasizing.

  I had to jerk off again, I got so riled imagining this Mike Trenton guy (whose profile I investigated thoroughly) luring my wife back to his apartment, where he showed her his pale, thick cock, and his pink hairy balls.

  Or maybe it was Jen. Jen who instigated, climbing over onto his lap in the car, taking hold of the reins in that awkward moment at the end of a date, where he was deciding whether or not to kiss her. Jen's thin body fitting easily between him and the steering wheel, her hips and ass moving in a rolling, curved wave as she rode his cock.

  Or maybe, even though there was no indication of it, maybe some of those ebony-skinned men from Mixd had filled her with their purple snakes...

  I showered, and tossed my clothes into the hamper near the dresser. Standing there with at towel in my hand, drying my hair, some scene from a movie tiptoed through my mind. A husband, suspicious of his wife, opening her dresser drawers and looking through her things...

  That was the extent of my memory of the scene.

  Whatever had happened after that, in that movie, was a mystery to me.

  But the idea was enough to make me drop the towel. And then, looking both directions before grasping the handles – as though someone would catch me in the act, or our cat, Fritters, would stare at me in disdain – I pulled open Jen's underwear drawer.

  Okay.

  I was never really expecting to find anything in there. It was more the act of digging through it in anticipation that I had been looking forward to.

  It was a vague idea that a snippet of a movie had planted in my head.

  The mood inspired by the sexy dating apps on her phone, the circumstantial evidence that hinted at something I loved to fantasize about but didn't want to be real.

  Not really, anyway.

  Inside Jen's underwear drawer, though, was an unmistakably damning body of evidence.

  I held them up by the handful: silky, embroidered panties; panties made of a see-through material; red panties; expensive white silky panties. Thongs.

  And then the kicker:

  A whole lingerie-looking getup, bra and all, connected together by straps that hinted at bondage.

  I moved backward, until the bed kicked me behind my knees and I sat down, stunned, with handfuls of lingerie in my hands.

  Now my respiration had gone haywire.

  So it was true.

  I mean: it had to be true, right? Apps were one thing, apps with no messages. Apps said maybe she was thinking about something. Apps said we needed to have a talk, apps were just...a doorway.

  But lingerie?

  I tried to steady my breath.

  Okay.

  Okay:

  Jen did, when she bought underwear anyway, buy silky and sexy things. Well, half of them were silky and sexy. She bought them and wore them once and then I never saw them again.

  So this wasn't necessarily proof of anything.

  But lingerie? Little lingerie getups like this?

  Never. Never in all our years of marriage.

  Still.

  It could just be a coincidence. A lawyer would say that. This was all circumstantial as fuck.

  No, you stupid fuck. A lawyer would tell you you're a fucking idiot, and your wife is having an affair, or two, or ten, right under your nose.

  C hapter 5

  DISCUSSION

  Jen came home what seemed like nanoseconds later.

  (It wasn't.

  It was very late.)

  I had gone back to the computer in the office, googling things like an idiot. “How to tell if your wife is having an affair;” “What does it mean if your wife buys lingerie;” all of the dating apps and their reputations; hotwife porn videos; and, for a brief moment and in an act of strange respite, re-roofing prices.

  By the time I heard the door click in the front of the house, a light suddenly flooded the kitchen and crept down the hallway, it had grown utterly dark around me. I was sitting, contorted into one of those obsessive positions before a computer screen, when obsession with a task crowds out your kinetic sensibilities and you crouch at the edge of the chair with your spine pretzeled and the blood flow cut off to one hand. Only the blue glow of the screen illuminated the house until Jen flicked on the light in the kitchen.

  I turned the phone off and shook my body out of the terrible position it was in.

  Feeling like an adolescent getting caught by my parents
with a girl in my room, I stashed the phone under some papers. My heart started pounding and I dashed into the bedroom and kicked off my pants and shirt. I lay down in bed, realizing that:

  1) the act was unconvincing, because my heart was beating so fast I needed to gulp air and

  2) it was utterly stupid. What, after all, did I think Jen was going to think I had done? Stayed up late to read a book, in my own house, like I always did? Perused some porn on the internet, which she knew I did anyway (though she didn't know exactly what kind of porn. The search terms I used. The way that “wife” made up a large portion of the searches.)

  I speed-walked into the bedroom and climbed into bed: I was still wearing boxers and a dirty shirt I had numbly fished out of the hamper after finding Jen's underwear.

  Shaking with the same silly, just-caught nerves, I took a book from the night table and opened it to a random page.

  I mean, fucking ridiculous.

  She was the one who caught, after all.

  I heard the cupboards in the kitchen slamming – Jen was not one to be quiet with doors, nor cupboards or cars or anything she could slam closed.

  I changed my mind abruptly. About pretending to be asleep or reading.

  I'm not sure why. A surge of testosterone went through me, or adrenaline, or something.

  I rose and walked with a surprising amount of calm into the kitchen.

  Jen was peering into the fridge. Her hair was in a ponytail. She looked tired. A gray sweatshirt slid off one shoulder, exposing the shape of her collarbone. It was sexy, but the rest of her outfit was a shapeless and formless as ever.

  “Oh,” she said, looking up at me. “You're still up.”

  I nodded.

  I was here to accuse her, and I was filled with jealous rage that she had done... whatever she had done. I was also so turned on by my musings, by Jen's lies and profiles, and the fantasies I had spun up about them, that my cock was throbbing against the zipper of my pants.

  She sighed and let the fridge swing shut. “I can't even... you have any dinner?”

  I shook my head.

  She looked at the clock. “Ugh. Too late to order.”

  “I fixed your phone,” I said. The statement came out of nowhere.

  I studied her intently as the words reached her. She pushed a fallen clump of hair from her face, long bangs that were too short to be retained by long in her ponytail. Her eyes moved listlessly around the kitchen, searching for something. “Uh-huh,” she said, vaguely. “No snacks either?” She picked up a box of cereal, and dropped it when she recognized it was empty.

  Then she opened the fridge again.

  I moved closer to her. I sniffed at the air, as deeply as I dared without revealing what I was doing and looking like a creep. Did she smell different?

  My nose was seeking some incriminating sexual flavor, and instead picked up the scent of cigarettes.

  “Did you smoke or something?” I said.

  Jen glared at me over the edge of the fridge. “No.”

  Then she sniffed herself. “Oh God. Gross.” She reached in to the fridge and took out a half-empty bottle of wine and shook it. “Any idea how long this has been here?” Then, as though my comment had just made its way to her brain, she sniffed her sweatshirt. “Yeah. That's Andy. He smokes all the way back to the office. It's pretty nasty.” She frowned and went to the counter with the wine. Distractedly she said, “I'll have to get him to stop. So gross...”

  I was only half-listening. Barely even thinking about what she was saying, except for the ways it might be a lie. Maybe Andy was real, but didn't it seem unusual that another man's cigarettes, out in the open air, would leave such a scent on her sweatshirt?

  I went behind her and slid my hands under her sweatshirt. Her soft skin rippled beneath my fingertips as I slid them along her ribs. My fingers were seeking the fabric of her bra, hoping to find something amiss about it. Hoping to find the feel of new lace, the smooth bumps of fine satin that would reveal another piece of her treachery.

  Or hoping to find the same old bra, a comfortable one with no fanfare and no frills. Proof that all of this was my imagination.

  She giggled and squirmed away. “Stop it. I'm trying to pour wine, here.”

  I inhaled the scent of her neck. Low clean tones of her soap, her usual soap and nothing more, were buried under the scent of her body, and an overlay of what reminded me of a library, a musty, papery, bookish smell.

  “Why so late?” I asked, setting a wine glass down to indicate I would like some, too.

  She harrumphed. “Just trying to make my hourly wage as ridiculous as possible,” she quipped, and tipped the wine glass back into her throat without pouring me any first. “What are you doing back there in the dark?”

  I judged her voice, her tone, the way she was standing as she said it. She was so very casual, so unworried. I watched her hand as she poured the wine: it didn't tremble, like mine would have, if I had been up to the things my wife was obviously up to.

  Could she really be this grand of a liar? This careful to cover up all evidence of what she was doing?

  And then be so stupid as to give me access to her phone?

  I pressed up against her to take the wine glass, and then I backed away. She turned around to face me.

  Her expression was expectant.

  Oh. Yes.

  What was I doing there in the dark?

  I took a sip of the wine.

  All of the thoughts about Jen and her apps and her late nights collided in my head. My brain felt soupy. My heart was pulled in two directions, each of them excruciating and exhilarating.

  “I updated your phone,” I repeated. My mouth felt numb.

  “You said,” she said, laughing a little. If anything about the phone made her feel even the slightest bit guilty, she didn't reveal it. Not even a flicker in her eyes. Nothing.

  She tipped her chin down and looked into my eyes. “And....that's all you did?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Now my voice was taking on a challenging tone to it.

  Jen set her wine down. “O-kay. I guess Chris has something to say. What have I done now?” She was annoyed, and because I was wildly off-track, it excited me that she had the audacity to feign irritation in her voice. It fueled my fantasies and my nightmares: she was on the defensive, misdirecting, because she knew she was in trouble. “Did I forget to use some top-secret anti-virus somethingly-jiggly? Did I leave my IP-something exposed to something?” She turned, smiling, and poured herself some more wine.

  Was she taking this as a joke?

  I felt fury percolate and bubble over inside of me.

  “You have a lot of apps on there,” I said, carefully. “Using a lot of personal information.”

  I was close to her body when I said this, and I distinctly felt a shudder go through her. Her muscles went tense and seemed to freeze in place.

  But she changed back to her relaxed expression so quickly, so easily, so convincingly, that I doubted I had felt her flinch at all within seconds. “Oh, shit,” she said. “I forgot to tell you about all those,” she said. She was smiling and she took another sip of her wine. The wine glass was steady in her hands; she could have performed surgery then, no problem. “You can just delete most of them.”

  My insides went cool again.

  “I... what?”

  The “what?” was less about the request to delete them than the fact that my wife did not seem to care in the least that I had found her apps.

  She shook her head. “I need to do it anyway, probably. Emery'd have a shitfit about it.”

  I stared at her. My mouth was open.

  Was she actually saying what I thought she was saying? Was her actual first concern about that prick Dave, and what he would say about her use of dating apps, as opposed to her husband?

  She looked over at me as she turned back to face the kitchen and lean on the counter. She had her lips on the glass and it made her next words wet and echoed: “What?
” she said with a snort. She swished the wine and took another sip. “It's unethical, I know, but it's so fucking hard to get data you can use any other way.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  I know. It's probably obvious to you, by now, what was going on. But for me it was a big stretch to get to that obvious truth. In part because I was raging with anger, and it's hard to shift from that suddenly. Also, I like to be right, like anyone does, and the mounting evidence for a completely different theory just wasn't making it past the gates.

  My mind was still charging ahead. Unable to believe the words coming from her mouth. Her casual demeanor.

  “'Unethical?'” I said, numbly.

  She set her wine glass down on the counter and gave me the look she gives me when I ask a question about something she believes I am supposed to know about. This is usually some fact about climate change or frogs or university policy, and something I don't feel I should know. “Of course it's unethical.”

  I stared at her. What was she saying? What the fuck was my wife saying?

  Of course it was unethical, to cheat on your husband.

  But why the fuck was she giving me that look and staring at me like I had two heads for?

  I was the one who had caught her, after all.

  “Anyway,” she said, taking her wine over to the island to get on a bar stool. She half-rolled her eyes as she moved. “Could you just delete them all, or is that like, really time consuming?”

  Delete them all?

  “Just delete them all?” I said.

  She looked back at me. “Well, not if it's going to take you forever, I can do it. I just thought you were some kind of wizard.”

  She turned back to her wine.

  “So you got what you needed?” I said incredulously.

  She shrugged. “I mean, not really.”

  I stared at her head.

  She looked back at me.

  At first, her eyes registered confusion. But then they seemed to brighten with recognition.

  She blew wine out of her nose and covered her face with a tremendous, and utterly unexpected chortle. “Oh my fucking God,” she said. “Don't tell me you thought those were...?” She waved her hand frantically. “Oh God. My nose burns. Jesus.”